Textual Analysis of Chinese College Students’ Typical Problems in English Argumentative Writing

Igor Smerdov

International College, Xingjian College of Liberal Arts, Guangxi University

igorsmerdov@mail.ru

Abstract I claim that the rigid scheme of work, cooperative

language learning, peer-error correction-based

teaching methods within the learner-oriented

strategy and process-product approach

(peer-editing and peer-error-correction based

classes and writing portfolio as the final product)

help students learn how to write and help teachers

survive the amount of grading. This embedded

case-study and qualitative research is supported by

the quantitative analysis of data obtained from the

180 Chinese students. I analyze student’s group and

individual progress/stagnation in terms of one

month timeline as well as the one year time

framework with more detailed analysis of

particularly chosen essays and drafts. Qualitative

results: essays became more coherent in terms of

thematic progression; they contain fewer rhetorical

questions that help them make up the 200 word

limit, fewer redundancies and generalized

statements throughout the whole process of

developing the argument. Students started using

real life examples, avoided rhetorical questions in

the first paragraph; started supporting ideas by

giving persuasive reasons and particular examples

related to their real life situations; stated topic

sentences clearly in the first paragraph and put

forward the main idea first.

Keywords Teaching ESL Writing, collaborative writing,

product-process oriented approach; peer-editing

Introduction. Social Context. “The number of students studying in Chinese

universities has reached 25 million, a five-fold

increase in only nine years” - said Zhou Ji, Chinese

Education Minister. "In only a few years, Chinese

higher education has transformed from an

education for the elite to one for the public, a

process commonly taking several decades to

accomplish in many countries," said Zhou at a

press conference (China has 25 mln college

students, Xinhua, 2007). So we are witnessing an

unprecedented expansion in the sphere of higher

education in China and it causes problems the

academic and teaching community never faced

before. The overall analysis of this unprecedented

situation - “teachers are over-tired and students are

over-worked” and students learn “deaf and dumb

English” (Li, Moreira, 2009: 183-184; Ji, 2009:

375-376). These conclusions are valid for many

Asian countries.

1. Literature Review.

1.1. Creative Writing in English as a Thing

in Itself and the Toughest Course in the

English Curriculum in China. Writing is traditionally one of the most, if not the

most, difficult parts of the English courses curricula

across China (Huang, 2009), as Chinese students’

writing skills are traditionally low due to huge

differences between rhetorical patterns of Chinese

and English and the same can be said about learners

of Writing in many counties (Erkan, Saban, 2011:

165-166). “Unlike the native speakers of English,

who expect expository prose to be developed as a

sequence of claims and (direct) Aristotelian proofs,

non-native users of English employ rhetorical

progression of text that are incongruous with the

expectations of the Anglo-American reader.

(Kachru, 2001) Chinese learners of English often

use the patterns borrowed from the locally produced

textbooks, so the level of originality and creativity

is predictably minimal as the writers have to

produce a few opinions and insert them into the

existing pattern.

The low English writing skills of Chinese

university students are also caused by additional

factors such as huge differences in the size of ESL

Writing classes in China and Writing classes in the

West (40-50, not to mention in non-English major

English college classes and classes in high schools

where the number of ESL students can be up to 70

in class versus 12-15 in a standard Writing class in

America, or even Hong Kong), and also a

significant difference in motivation. At Chinese

universities, students need an ESL Writing course

just to pass the national exams such as The Test for

English Majors-4 and -8 (TEM-4 and TEM-8),

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226

which is a prerequisite for getting a BA degree in

English (Ji, 2009: 376). The important factor is that

Chinese college students very rarely fail university

courses, and if they fail, they have a chance to take

this exam again and again. Students also cannot be

expelled from universities on the basis of academic

failures. Jingyan claims that the recent focus of

Chinese employers and businesses on hiring

students with good oral English skills contributes to

the poor writing skills of Chinese English majors

when they graduate. She writes: “students, teachers,

authorities and officials alike have come to the

consensus that more emphasis should be laid on the

oral communicative abilities of students in order to

meet the increasing social needs.” (Jingyan, 2006).

The survey conducted by Wang Yi (2004) in

Shanghai Jiaotong University supports the view that

“students (65.84%) considered oral English as the

most important skill” (Jingyan, 2006). The problem

is exacerbated by the obvious lack of effective

methods of teaching Writing in the exam-oriented

paradigm that help teachers handle the

overwhelming grading load. Weekly essay

assignments, free-writing and keeping diaries

somehow work with overcrowded Chinese classes

and make the students write often and it helps them

improve their writing skills, but without the

teacher’s error-correction, it very often turns into an

exercise in futility as it perpetuates existing

grammar and writing problems. Teacher’s

corrections require time and extra effort as the sheer

size of classes makes grading and error-correction a

daunting task. (Huang, 2009)

2.2 Introduction of the Process-Product

Approach to Teaching English Writing Normally, the process-product approach to

teaching English Writing is a part of the framework

of the interactive “Cooperative Language Learning”

(CLL), “an approach to teaching that makes

maximum use of cooperative activities involving

pair and small groups of learners in the classroom”

(Richards, Rodgers, 2008: 192-203). What is also

often used is “the interactive approach, according to

which the writer is “involved in a dialogue with his

or her audience” and which holds that “the person

primarily responsible for effective communication

is the writer” (Johns, 1990), and the social

constructionist approach, according to which “the

written product is considered a social act that can

take place only within and for a specific context and

audience.” (Gabrielatos, 2002)

The emphasis is on the process of writing

in all its stages – planning, collecting material,

drafting and redrafting, proof-reading and error

correction and also on students creating a final

product in the form of a writing portfolio collecting

their writings together for others, not just the

teacher, to read. It is entirely based on the

cooperative learning as “group learning activity

organized so that learning is dependent on the

socially structured exchange of information

between learners in groups and in which learner is

held accountable for his or her own learning and is

motivated in increase the learning of others” (Olsen,

Kagan, 1992: 8).

This approach made the whole process of

writing real for the students (Myles, 2002: 2). It

reflected the process that real writers would go

through in writing for publication, so giving them a

purpose for writing that went beyond simply

writing for the teacher to gain a mark and to

practice for an exam. The product – writing

portfolio (Gearhart, Wolf, 1997; Schwarzer, Kahn,

Smart, 2000) – would give purpose to the process

of drafting, redrafting, proof-reading and

error-correction that would otherwise simply be

tedious and repetitive for students. Some

modifications of the Process-Product approach to

writing suggest the creation of the “community of

writers” (Elbow, Belanoff, 2000: 9) and “a cyclical

framework of teaching procedures comprising

four stages: awareness-raising, support,

practice and feedback.” (Gabrielatos, 2002)

2. 3 Developmental and Progress Measuring

Studies

Article based on classroom research in

the Asian and, particular, Chinese context,

abound showing and defending different

methods of teaching English Writing such as

“Creative Writing” that is attaching importance

to “model works” (gao fen zuo wen) and encouraging student to imitate models (Gang,

2005: 143-145). In terms of argumentative

writing, Cheng analyzed and longitudinally

measured students’ arguments and usage of

unjustifiable, relevant, important and strong

reasons (Cheng, 2010, pp.12-18). The authors

of this paper analyze on the basis of classical

rhetoric and stasis theory how students made

progress in formulating effective reasons in

their writing throughout two semesters in their

first college year.

Xioaling Ji (2009, 2011) analyzed longitudinal

patterns of Chinese students’ developments as

writers measuring their fluency (error-free

T-unit length), lexical complexity (T-unit

complexity) and word type variation (Ji, 2009,

pp. 381-382). Ji involved a relatively big group

of participants of up to 100 students within

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their 2 year studies and preparation for the

national exams, so the value of qualitative

results Ji obtained and qualitative analysis the

she performed is that the process of Chinese

students’ growth as English writers can be

described and documented, so the teachers can

easily define their students’ weaknesses and

strong sides to help them appropriately. We are

pursuing similar goals of helping EFl/ESL

teachers identify their students’ growth

potential for improvements in essay writing.

We concentrate on different elements of writing

process, namely those related to narration and

argument-building as well as analysis of

particular grammar errors that can be tackled

within one month and one year of the standard

university ESL writing course.

2.4 Method. This paper falls into the rubrics of the action

research (Nunan, 2002) and “a situated qualitative

research” (McKinley, 2005: 139-140) supported by

the quantitative data analysis obtained from the

experiment with teaching and the results of

thematic, textual, stylistic and narrative analyses of

the participants’ essays. “Action research is

becoming increasingly significant in language

education” (Nunan, 2002) and since that time

its influence has grown. Simpson put

“conducting action research” as one of the

teaching techniques that “allow the Western

EFL teachers to explore the baggage that they

have brought to their overseas teaching

experiences.” (Simpson, 2008: 391) This type

of research “seeks to increase the teacher's

understanding of classroom teaching and

learning and to bring about improvements in

classroom practices.”(Snell, 1999) My paper is in line with the current trend of the embedded

one-shot case studies conducted by

internal observers at the grass root level and also

encouraged by an obvious shift in the ESL teaching

paradigm from teacher-centrism to learner-centrism

(Jacobs, Farrell, 2001). The supplementary

methods I utilized are the narrative inquiry of the

students’ “grammatical problems, lexical density

analysis (Ure, 1971; Shokrpour, 2005), systemic

analysis of the students’ essays (Moghaddam,

2010), error classification (Polio, 1997). The

students were taught within the framework of the

process-product approach with emphasis on

peer-editing (Gearhart, Wolf, 1997; Tompkins,

2003; Hornik, 2010) whereby the students would

read and comment on, proof-read and correct each

others’ essays, then redraft a number of times

before the teacher saw and marked the third draft.

This scheme of teaching would not only give the

students an audience other than the teacher for their

writing, give them an understanding of the writing

process and sharpen their ability to proof-read and

correct their own writing but also save on

teacher-marking time. The research questions

addressed in this paper are: What overall progress

have students made within the short term

instructional circle of 6 weeks and the long one of

one year within the framework of process-product

approach to teaching English Writing? What are

points of stagnation learners are still facing?

3.1 Settings. I summarized the teaching procedure in the short way in a table following Cheng’s

sample (Cheng, 2010: 9) Table 1. 6-week

Instructional Phase:

Week In-class Activities Home Assignments

1.Brainstorm-Outline Introduction, brainstorming the topic,

presentations for their brainstorms, discussion,

the teacher’s input/summary, write an outline if

time permits

50-70 word outline

2. Outline 3-4 presentations of outlines, Q/A session,

discussion, corrections of outlines, the teacher’s

input/summary

1st draft, 200 word essay

3. 1st Draft individual peer-editing, 3-4 presentations of the

1st drafts, Q/A session, discussion, corrections of

drafts, the teacher’s input/summary

2nd draft, 200 word essay;

peer-editing (optional)

4. 2nd Draft individual peer-editing, 3-4 presentations of the

2nd drafts, Q/A session, discussion, corrections of

outlines, the teacher’s input/summary

3rd draft, 200 word essay,

typed, printed out;

peer-editing (optional)

5. 3rd Draft, typed,

printed out

group/class peer-editing of a selected 3rd draft

during the presentation of the selected 3rd draft,

corrections of the selected 3rd draft, individual

peer-editing of the 3rd drafts (later the teacher

next assignment, 50-70 word

outline of an essay

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marks it as well as the essay). Brainstorming the

next topic if time permits

6. Return of the

marked 3rd Drafts.

Start finalizing the 4th

draft

the teacher gives the corrected/marked 3rd drafts

of the essays back to students, analyzes the

essays, if necessary. 3-4 presentations of outlines,

Q/A session, discussion, corrections of outlines,

the teacher’s input/summary.

1) 1st draft, 200 word essay

2) The 4th, final, clean and

neat draft goes to the Writing

Portfolios

Comments on the 4th Drafts: The teacher

corrects all the mistakes in the 3rd drafts, gives the

essays back to students to incorporate the

corrections and print out the final, 4th draft that goes

to the Writing Portfolio. The Portfolio is checked

out and assessed at the end of the term. Students

write self and peer-evaluations (optional).

Assessment criteria for the essays and social notes

in portfolios were taken from the Chinese national

test for English majors (TEM4).

3.2 Data Collection The timeline of the experiment was the whole

academic year of 2008-2009 when students

completed seven essays. I’ve collected 42 drafts of

students’ essays on social topics, around 200 words

each. The essays were written by students in their

freshman year. I analyzed particular students’

mistakes quantitatively and qualitatively.

Quantitatively I codified them as issues of grammar,

spelling, word/phrase choice, redundancies (such as

rhetorical questions) and sentence structure.

Qualitatively I analyzed changes of ideas on the

stage between outline and drafts 1,2,3 and also

analyzed the authors’ logic, the way they handle

cultural details, paragraph structure and keywords.

3.3 Data Analysis. 3.3 Results within the Long Term (one year)

Framework:

3.3.1 Students learned to express ideas in the direct

way reducing their L1 influence. Students learned

to avoid rhetorical questions in the first paragraph.

Student A’s Essay “A Good Neighbor” in

September. Paragraph 1, draft 1: The beginning

was: “So what kind of person can be a perfect

one?”

Progress: In the final draft after 4 weeks: rhetorical

questions have never appeared in her essays after

October up to the end of the year.

3.3.2 Started supporting ideas by giving persuasive

reasons and started relating the described events to

their own life. At the beginning, there were no

examples related to students’ daily life. From many

essays, starting from the second month, we see

phrases which related to their life, such as “a friend

of mine”, “as we are the students, we should…”

Student A essay “Campus Love” in October.

“A friend of mine was an outstanding student

before she had a boyfriend”

Progress: More personalized style has been shaping

up. Stagnation: In the form of 200 word essay, it’s

very hard to diversify their style. They need more

creative forms, but the genre approach and

genre-based tasks (Yasuda, 2011) (e.g. the TEM4

examination essay) puts limits on their development

as writers.

3.3.3 They stated topic sentences in the first

paragraph and put forwards the main idea first.

Student A’s essay Campus Love in November. Draft

1, paragraph1: With the advent of Internet, making

friends online becomes prevailing. And people hold

different opinions about its effect.

Final draft 3, paragraph 1 looks differently: “With

the advent of the Internet, making friends online

becomes prevailing. I’m lucky that I don’t follow

the mainstream. I think it has more disadvantages

than advantages.”

Comment: We can also notice that the problem of

conjunction “And” at the beginning of sentences

was solved in this draft in the 3rd moth of training.

The remark on disadvantages prevailing over

advantages is a sign of developing a productive

model for this sort of genre-based task.

3.3.4 Students concluded the essays with extended

ideas expressed in synonyms to key words.

“Lexical variation and sophistication” (Ji, 2009:

386-387) were found in essays. The Value of Time,

December. Student B: Paragraph 1: “The most

precious thing in the world is time. It’s much more

expensive than gold, because day and night

alternate in quick succession. We can never go back

to yesterday, so everyone should throw himself into

life.”

Paragraph 3: God gives everyone 24 hours per day,

so it’s up to all of us to have a wonderful life if we

live actively or we’ll regret deeply as we

accomplished nothing though we seemingly always

on the run. The best we do is to live with all our

energy

Comment: In the underlined sentences, we can see

that the student reiterates her main idea but she

uses another expression.

3.3.5 Students started linking their own thoughts to

provisional readers (the foreign teacher) and use

more detailed sentences to persuade the readers, e.g.

wrote explanatory notes for readers which had no

ideas of Chinese background, such as years of

dynasties.

Student B’s essay “My Perception of History” in

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November:

“History could be forgiven, but can not be

forgotten and future must not be distorted,” said

Lian Zhan, a Taiwan government official. Added

later in draft 2.

Student C’ essay “My Perception of History”

“Franklin was a famous scientist in America.

Although it was a dangerous mission, he didn’t

give up. He invented the lightning rod”. His action

taught me that bravery is an important factor.”

Comment: In the underlined sentences, we see that

the students started making more convincing

detailed comments on their own statements

regarding the topic.

3.3.6 Lexical Density - number of lexical word

tokens, nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs / Total

number of words (Moghaddam, 2010: 160).

It didn’t change significantly as in the fist

essay in September it was M=3.4482 and at the

end of the year M=3.6363, but the complexity

was heavily dependant on the complexity of

social topics (such as the comparison where

they had to compare two ways of life

“Differences between College Life and Life at

High School”, so the fact that students’ essays

became less diversified cannot be taken as a sign of stagnation.

3.4 Noticeable Results within the Short Term ( five weeks) Framework. Real Life Examples

Only 5 essays out of 53 contained particular

examples in supporting main ideas. Some of them

give very general examples. For instance, Student

D’s essay “What is the Good Qualities of

Neighbours.”

“Honesty is a good qualities because they are

sincere. I like neighbour who are honest, they will

not lie to me.”

Student E: “Kindness is a good quality, because they

are easygoing, they are always kind to others. I like

people, who are warm-hearted, if I am in trouble

they are willing to help”

Only few students write with specific example, e.g.

Student F: “I think warm-heartedness is a good

quality, because I have a good neighbour who was

very warm-hearted, once I was ill and my parents

were not at home, I asked her for help and she sent

me to the hospital, called my mom and took care of

me. If she didn’t help me that night, I wouldn’t be

recovered soon.”

The reason caused this kind of problem is that when

they write in Chinese, students do not use specific

examples. Compositions in Chinese are based on

anecdotes on famous people, but not on what

happened in students’ life. So students just started

using specific, real life-based, examples in their

essays.

Stagnation: After 5 weeks of practice, most the

students are aware of using the specific examples,

but they are not familiar with it, so less than 10 % of

learners added specific examples to their essays.

4. Conclusions and Practical Suggestions

The author utilized the Chinese students’ habit of

being assessed by their teachers on every possible

test or occasion making it clear to them that their

marks will depend primarily on continuous

assessment. Marks were given for the essay

assignments, peer-editing of those essays in class,

presentations of outlines and drafts of essays in

class, peer-error-correction in class, self-evaluations,

peer-evaluations, writing portfolios at the end of the

term. In this situation of tight control of students’

class performance, the visible results within one

year of training in English writing that can be

attributed to the positive input in writing are not

very impressive, but worth noticing: 1) less than

10 % of students learned to use real life examples

after the first month of training. 2) they

significantly reduced their first language influence

and stopped using rhetorical questions and

repetitions after the month of training. 3) started

giving personalized reasons as supporting ideas and

started expressing the main ideas in the first

sentence rather than at the end of the first paragraph

or later. 4) within 3-4 months of training, they

learned how to use specific and real-life

experienced based examples making their writing

more vivid. 5) started using synonyms and

rephrased topic sentences at the end of essays. 6)

after 3-4 months of training, they started paying

attention to the provisional reader and started

explaining major points and commenting on them

in detail.

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